Cartoon Figure LED Lamp

Introduction: Cartoon Figure LED Lamp

Follow me and you'll get a nice toy: a funny monster with the power of brightness in his eyes.
It will scare ghosts out of your bed!
Or, you can use it as an unusual flashlight.

Step 1: Materials Needed

- Some Fimo, or any other oven-bake polymer clay.
- Two LEDs, 3 Volts or more each.
- Two batteries, 1.5 Volts each. Better find some button type, but AAA or even AA will be OK.
- A switch.
- Electrical wire.
- An oven to bake the clay. If you want, you can just use normal clay and avoid burning up all your house.

If you can't find this stuff at your local hardware store, open up things you have at home!
Remote controls are full of switches, and many bicycle torches have powerful LEDs.

Step 2: Body Modeling

Warm up some clay with your hands.
Be sure to have enough material to make a body as large as you need to contain the batteries.

You can wrap the clay around a thick marker, so when you take it off it leaves the holed structure.

To make eyes, first squash a ball of clay and then use the back of a brush to stab it in the center, so to make the eye holes. Make holes slightly larger than your LEDs.

Smooth out your fingerprints!

Step 3: Bake the Clay

Follow the exact instructions to bake your clay. Mine said to heat it for about 30 minutes, but 15 were enough.
Place the plate on the higher step of your oven, or you'll crisp the bottom of the figure.

When it's ready, let it cool down out of the window. Watch out, it keeps heat for much longer than the metal plate.

Ah, cooking it doesn't mean you can eat it.

Step 4: Build the Circuit

Stack the two batteries and tape them together, place two wires in contact with the positive and negative poles.

Connect the switch to the positive wire.

You want the LEDs to be set in parallel, so connect them both to the wires.
Keep the switch turned on, so that you can test LEDs and respect the polarity.

Step 5: Finishing

Paint the mouth of the monster using acrylic colors. You can achieve the glossy effect by spraying a finishing varnish on the whole figure.

Place the circuit inside the body. Close the bottom with wire or raw clay, but leave out the switch.

It's all done, the monster is ready!

Now wait for the Lord of Darkness to come steal your soul and face him with the help of you new magical helper.

Wery nice instructable, just made one of these, and attached some images. Mouth is green because we couldnt find any other color, but i think it looks good anyway! I also used sand paper on the led so the light is not so concentrated.

Gona make a few more for friends in a few days. Thanks for the great idea!

i really like this instructable the only thing that i would say should be updated is to create some sort of a dock for the batteries this way it would be easier to replace then unntaping everything just to change two little batteries also i tried the double and triple a batteries they didnt work at all

This is great.
I had a quick comment about the clay baking aspect.
You mentioned that your baking time was less than stated on the instructions.
This could be because your oven is not accurate or it fluctuates.
I have read that is a common thing for household ovens.
Anyway, an oven thermometer will let you be sure you are heating your oven to the proper temperature.

first of all...COOL FREAKIN INSTRUCTABLE!!! and second of all theres been this little guy showing up in all of my sketches and i wanna make one of these but i have a question or two...when you poke the holes for the eyes do you go all the way through or what? and do you leave a space for all the parts inside? and how do you change the batteries?

I think it would be smart to add Resistors to your circuit; otherwise it can happen that the LEDs get broke in short time.
But your figures look very funny; I'm thinking about making some too (with resistors ;) )

I tried with 1/4W 150Ohm resistors, but after all we want LEDs to be as brighter as they can. The LEDs I used have a voltage of 3.6V, the batteries together output 3V. Do you think resistors are needed in this case?

In the case of LEDs it is not (only) about the voltage, you have to use resistors in front of a led because it is necessary to limit the current.If you don't include a resistor into your circuit the LED will take way too much current (I don't know about specific values but I already heard about 500mA) this will kill your LED over the time!

To limit the current you can take very small resistors (for example 10 Ohm (I think even smaller values are possible). This will not decrease the Brightness visible.

Some people say that Batteries got a own resistance but you don't know how much this is and if it really works.

If you include resistors you can be sure that your LEDs will glow for years without any damage.